Thought for the Week - 9th April 2023

Dear Friends, 

Jesus Christ is risen today! Alleluia!

Happy Easter!

The long Lenten fast is over for another year and now we celebrate the good news that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead and the Season of Easter begins. We hear now the post-resurrection encounters in the gospel stories of how Jesus meets with his friends and shows them his wounds as they marvel at this wonderful news. Perhaps one of my favourite encounters is of the two followers of Jesus who were walking on the road to Emmaus, away from Jerusalem. Luke’s gospel records that ‘they were talking with each other about everything that had happened’ (Luke 24:14). It had been a momentous week and Jesus, who they had put so much of their faith in to bring them relief and rescue from Roman occupation, had been a failure. He had died an ignominious death – crucifixion – perhaps the cruellest mode of execution ever invented and now they were loss and confused. In her Lent book Failure by Emma Ineson, she writes, ‘It is the disciples’ sense of incomprehension that speaks most clearly into our experience of failure – or the fear of it at least. It is the place where we don’t know what is going to happen, but we fear the worst’. Is that what these two on the Emmaus road – one named Cleopas, the other unnamed – had in their minds as they walked away from the desperate scene in Jerusalem? The gospel reminds us that ‘they stood still, their faces downcast’ when Jesus, whom they did not at this stage recognise, asked them what they were talking about. As they explained to Jesus all that had happened, as if he did not already know, these two unburdened themselves, which must have been something of a relief to ‘talk it through’ as the modern parlance would have us do if something was troubling us. It is not until Jesus ‘took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them’ that their eyes were opened, and they recognised him. Such was this encounter with the risen Lord Jesus Christ that they turned around and headed back to Jerusalem to tell the others – perhaps a metaphor for us all to contemplate about turning our own lives around and following Jesus, back to the heart of the message of the good news, heard most clearly in the post-communion prayer of acclamation – Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again!    

Grace and peace,

Neil 

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